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Technology Stocks : Silicon Graphics, Inc. (SGI)

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To: Charles G. Zentay who wrote (460)	12/1/1996 3:22:00 AM
From: Michael Madden	of 14451

UNIX vs. WINTEL There are really only a handful of advantages that UNIX systems have over modern Intel-based servers. Here are the first two off the top of my head: 1) Most RISC processors have much better floating point performance than Intel processors. This means that UNIX workstations and servers are still the best solution for compute intensive scientific and engineering applications. 2) Unix is a multi-user operating system that was born and evolved in the network environment over twenty years. Many UNIX variants are very versatile and flexible. They can be configured to perform many specialized network-enabled tasks. Unix has also accumulated a rich set of powerful utilities that makes programming the system much easier. All offer rudimentary distributed computing (i.e., remote execution). Some offer more complex distributed computing models. UNIX also scales well to multiple processors. WindowsNT is not multi-user, its multi-profile. Multiple users can have an account on an NT system but only one account can be active at any given time. Citrix Systems and Exodus Technologies both have solutions to make WindowsNT multi-user, but Microsoft does not officially support these. This oversite does limit WindowsNT's capabilities as a server and distributed computing architecture in secure environment's. Overall, its not a huge disadvantage. Most network applications, such as the World Wide Web, are transaction-based applications that don't require an actual login connection. WindowsNT's distributed computing model (DCOM) is still in its infancy, not yet time tested in the commercial world. WindowsNT does not scale as well as UNIX to multiple processors. WindowsNT's set of built-in utilities are not nearly as rich as those typically found on a Unix system. But, there is no shortage of third party vendors who will be happy to sell you the components you need. 3) In an earlier article, I also discuss how WindowsNT's process scheduling is not sophisticated enough to support hard real-time applications. Some UNIX variants have this capability. IRIX is one of them.

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